Men Are Better Than Women At Everything Except —

AMERICAN politics has a glass ceiling that keeps women down. This is a wisdom so conventional that Hillary Clinton, in conceding to Barack Obama in 2008, could safely earn cheers and tears by thanking her supporters for those “18m cracks in it.”

The only trouble is that empirical analysis has not found a bias against female candidates. In fact, a new study in California suggests that voters are, if anything, biased in favour of women. That glass thing in American politics, in other words, might be an elevator, not a ceiling.

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In the Democratic races, women fared much better than men. This might be expected, because voters seem to associate women with more “liberal” issues (starting with, well, women’s issues), and Democratic primary voters tend to be liberal. More surprising, perhaps, were the results of the Republican primaries. Conservative voters tend to be more concerned with allegedly manly issues such as law and order and defence. This should put female candidates at a disadvantage. But it didn’t. Even among Republicans, a male name carried no advantage.

In half of the political races, women had an advantage. In the other half, there was no advantage to be had; for men OR for women.